The Jade God by Alan Sullivan (snow like ashes series txt) 📕

“You mean my mother?” she said quickly.

He nodded. “You told me she could not face coming in here, but you came, and that explained much.”

“Mother would not understand,” she admitted, “and I think you’re very wise. But is there nothing else I can do?”

“Yes, if you will, a little later on, tell me some of the things I would like to know. May I bring my sister to see you?”

“Please do; we should be very glad.”

She said goodbye. The ordeal she had dreaded was over and concluded in a fashion she never anticipated. It was all strange⁠—and yet not strange. She was persuaded that this interview had been dominated by something her father had left behind, in order that it might fight for what Derrick called readjustment. And in that she was ready to aid to the utmost. There was no room for fear now. She declined Derrick’s offer to walk home with her and went thoughtfully back with a new sense of being fortified in things that for years past had stirred secretly in her soul.

Derrick sat in the study late that night, with no pretense at work. Beech Lodge had dipped into utter silence, and the fire was low. His mind was full of the visitor of the afternoon, whose coming had lent a new significance to his surroundings. Now he perceived more clearly what it must have cost her to come. He was conscious of her communicable courage, the charm of her youth, and above all of the fact that to her also something had whispered from the infinite. How vivid she was, how understanding!

He wondered, too, what impression she carried away. Had he said too much, or too little? In talking, as he had done, to the daughter of a murdered man while she sat in her father’s study beneath her father’s portrait, in taking on himself the office of avenger⁠—had he not already gone too far and too fast? Could Jean Millicent have done otherwise than approve while she must have been still struggling with profound and reawakened emotions? Had he been stilted and self-assured and pedantic? Had he assumed too much? These questions harassed him.

Against it he put the girl’s coming. She had not known what manner of person she would find but, braving the revival of her own loss, had determined to do what she could to save others from any tragic experience. This thought grew in his mind till, in turn, he recognized a new element in this strange affair. He had desired to answer if he could the voiceless petitions of the dead man, but now, in addition, he felt a wave of protection for those whom Millicent had left behind. It was this, he realized, that had animated him during his talk with Jean Millicent. And she had promised to help. He got up restlessly, lowered the lamp, and, moving to the French window, stared out at the moon-smitten lawn. How often must Millicent, who was so close tonight, have stared like this? Perhaps it was on such a night that the evil thing came, strong and merciless. But whence and how?

It was in the midst of a space of profound silence that he heard the faintest click at the door. He started at that, for his sister had been long in bed, and Perkins’s room was in the far corner of the house. What moved in Beech Lodge now? The door was opening, so slowly that it was almost imperceptible. His hair began to prickle. Was this the evil thing, and what did it seek?

He stood, breathless and motionless, his pulse hammering, till through the widening crack projected a hand, followed by a long arm and white-clad shoulder. The fingers were empty and extended as though feeling blindly. Then a face, pallid as of the dead. It was Perkins!

She glided forward without sound or speech, a wraith, a spirit of the night, so unreal, so remote as to be divested of human attributes, the thin hand still held out, exploring and testing the half-light that filtered through the silent chamber. It was the hand rather than the body that had life, with consciousness in its quivering fingertips. She was only partly dressed and wore a loose white wrapper that accentuated the tall straightness of her figure. Her black hair hung in two thick ropes over her shoulders; her feet were bare; and her face was that of one who sees unspeakable things. The eyes were wide open, and in their glassy stare was a strange hunger and a great question.

She came on like an uncaptured spirit, feeling delicately along the paneled wall, a creature of body and flesh, but directed by some mysterious influence beyond human ken. She did not look toward the window but paused for a moment to survey the portrait with an unearthly and profound recognition. From this she turned to the desk, leaning over it, her dangling ropes of hair rendered semi-luminous against the lamp, peering, peering, till at length the long, questing fingers found what they sought, and poised, quivering above the stain.

Now she swayed, leaning ever a little more forward, till at last her head drooped, her arms stretched out, and her lips touched that darkened patch where they rested in a mute and desperate caress.

“Master,” she pleaded, “master, where are you now? Why did you go; why are you not here where you used to be? The evil waits still, and all is empty and cold and dead without you, all dead, all dead!”

The voice ceased like a wail in the night, drowned in silence. Her lips pressed close to the stain till they seemed to infuse into it the message of her own blood, while the blind fingers groped and groped for that they could not find. Then with a sigh that hung tremulous in the throbbing air she moved to the portrait, made a slow, despairing gesture of farewell, and glided back to the door and out of